The Roommate Agreement(63)

“Listen to me.” I closed even more distance between us. “No matter how badly I tease you or we fight, you will never lose me. Your friendship is everything to me, no matter how I feel about you. I’ll take a broken heart over losing you. Just know this; no matter how we feel, no matter what happens, what we have is too strong to break. I’ll hound your ass until I die and then some.”

She turned her cheek into my hand, laughing softly. “I have fun with you, you know that? I never thought it would happen, but dating you has been so fun.”

“Brie and Sean left already. You wanna ride the teacups and get some cotton candy?”

She immediately brightened. “Are you kidding? Brie hates the teacups. They’re my jam.”

“Brie hates them because they move at the speed of her brain.” I linked my fingers through Shelby’s, pulling her after me. “And before you say it, cotton candy is the only thing I will accept that’s pure sugar.”

“Bitch, please.” Shelby snorted. “You put pure sugar in your coffee every morning!”

“Did you just call me a bitch?”

“In the nicest way possible.”

“There is no such thing.”

“Welcome to dating me. I use all my brain power when I write. Anything between the hours of eight p.m. and eleven a.m. is not subject to filtering.”

I glanced back at her. “Does that mean you can talk dirty then?”

“Why? Are you lacking in that department?” Her eyes sparkled, her lips curving. “Because I can recommend some books if you are.”

I tugged her into my side and wrapped an arm around her waist, anchoring her against me. “Not at all. I was just wondering if you partook in the activity.”

“Partook in the activity?” She leaned into me and giggled as we walked. “Excuse you, William Shakespeare. Have you been reading?”

“Only the sports news.” I directed around a group of teens who weren’t paying attention to their surroundings. “I was trying to be dignified.”

“Picking up socks is dignified.”

“I picked up the fucking socks!”

Shelby laughed, wrapping both arms around my waist and stopping us dead in the middle of the pier. She beamed up at me, her hair in loose waves, her brown eyes stripped back to show how much she loved this.

“I know.” Her smile only widened as she tightened her grip on me. “You know, I don’t care.”

“About what?”

“About anything,” she replied. “About the bets our family apparently set.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “They threw me for a minute, but I really don’t care, not when I think about it. We had the best date ever.”

“You did wear heels for me.”

She extracted herself from my arms for a second to mock-curtsey. “And you appreciate what I did. That’s teamwork, you know?”

I pulled her back to me and kissed her forehead. “Is it teamwork if you wash my shorts from now on?”

“Is it a communal laundry basket? That’s a real issue.”

“Does it need to be?”

“If you think I’m doing yours and mine…”

“No!” I laughed, holding her tighter when she tried to level me with a dark look. “One wash a week. Each. Is that fair?”

She leaned back just enough to eye me. “We need a new chore chart. And a new meal plan. And—”

“Shut up.”

I kissed her. She squealed, but I didn’t care. She had an awful lot of time to talk about her to-do lists and her chore plans and her meal plans and whatever else she needed to make her life be organized. I laughed because she was such a flighty person with her imagination, yet she needed control over every other aspect.

That could be figured out.

Today.

Tomorrow.

Next week.

It would be done.

For now, we could abide by the rules we had. That no pants were the best pants. That Oreos had to be labeled. That bathroom doors had to be locked. That the feather duster was my friend. That we both had to clean our hair out of various sinks and drains.

I’d figure out the vacuum tomorrow.

I’d put a pen next to the notebook on the windowsill in the bathroom.

I’d work out how exactly to load the dishwasher next week.

I’d replace the candle she liked to burn while she wrote next month.

I didn’t care. I didn’t care about chores or routines or rules as long as she believed in us, and by the way she kissed me back, she did.

She kissed me hard, in the middle of the pier, surrounded by a bunch of people.

It wouldn’t be easy. It’d be hard, in fact. So hard. But she was the one who wrote romance. If anything, she was more prepared for this than I was.

All I knew was that I was standing here with my arms around my best friend as she kissed me back. As she sent fire through my veins and desire straight to my cock.

As she brought her body so hard against mine through tiny giggles that I knew that, somehow, somewhere, at some point, we’d be totally fucking okay.

She wrapped her arms around my neck.

I gripped her ass.

And I smiled against her lips as she did the same.

Yeah.

We were gonna be just fine.